‘Having a good time without me are you, then?’
Then Yanka was discharged, my game came to an end and I went home.
Mummy had a second operation.
I remember the conversation with the doctor who took away my last hope.
I asked:
‘Tell me, how much longer has she got left to live? A year?’
‘Oh no! Everything will move quickly now.’
‘And there’s nothing else that can be done?’
‘No.’
He apologised for having to go and added:
‘Tell her about it. I always think it’s best if someone close tells them, not the doctor.’
I went back to the ward, knowing that Mummy was waiting for me there and she would ask:
‘Well? What did he say?’
Before going to her, I went down into the courtyard, to gather my strength. I wanted to take a gulp of fresh air, with no hospital smell. Outside, light snow was falling and the yard keeper was scraping it into heaps with a spade. A cat ran by and for a moment I thought it was my Thumbtack, I called her, but it was Thumbtack in a new skin.
I remember I thought about the doctor who had given me the news:
The message and the messenger.
He could have suggested that I sit down, told me the same thing in a different tone of voice, let me hear at least a little bit of sympathy.
It’s probably his defence against news like this – that cold, dry tone.
The yard keeper smiled at me and blew his nose as if he wanted to boast: Just look how much snot there is in this nostril, and now look how much there is in this one!
An old couple walked by, talking.
‘In that sense liver cancer’s better than the others …’
I don’t know why all this has stuck so clearly in my memory.
When I went back to the ward, Mummy asked:
‘Well? What did he say?’
‘Everything’s going to be all right.’
Mummy dozed off after she was given a dose of painkiller.
I sat beside her, looking out through the window at the snowflakes, black against the bright background of the sky. Mummy fell asleep, but immediately gave a shudder and opened her eyes. She gazed round the ward, saw me and said:
‘I kept on believing that a miracle would happen. And you know, I think a miracle has happened. I’m ready for this. I’m not afraid of anything any more.’
Mummy’s illness entered some new stage. She had suddenly found peace and acceptance. She used to be afraid of being left alone, but now she seemed to be afraid of any intrusion into her narrowed world. Before, she used to ask me to phone her friends and get them to visit her in the hospital more often. She complained that when someone is ill, people start avoiding them.
‘If you have nothing more to give people, they go.’
But now she asked me to make sure there were fewer visitors. And if someone did come, she said nothing most of the time, waiting for her visitor to leave.
During the final days she and I didn’t talk, just spoke a few insignificant words to each other now and then.
One time she handed me a sealed envelope and said she had thought out all the arrangements for her funeral and written down what I should do.
‘Only promise me you won’t spend money on anything unnecessary! Don’t waste your money on me. Do you promise?’
I nodded.
Mummy’s appearance had changed a lot. She was being consumed by the cancer. She dried up, shrivelled away. It became easy to turn her over in the bed. Her eyelids turned black.
She was tormented by hunger, but she couldn’t eat anything any longer, every time she took food her body sent it all back. At first Mummy was ashamed of these fits of vomiting and didn’t want me to see her like that, but later she didn’t have the strength to be ashamed. I sat beside her and stroked her shoulder, and she groaned from the pain of the nauseous spasms that had just ended and the fear that she would start vomiting again soon.
I tried all the time to keep her hopes up, assuring her that everything would be all right, and she seemed to me to be clinging to this hope. But one of her friends met me in the corridor and said:
‘Sasha, your mum knows all about herself, she knows she hasn’t got long left to live, and she asked me not to tell you, so you wouldn’t be upset.’
She burst into tears:
‘Poor thing, she’s suffering so much. Oh, let it be quick!’
Mummy complained:
‘If death comes to everyone, what did I do to make mine so painful? Why do I have to suffer so much? I’d like to live out my last days with dignity, but what dignity can there be with pain like this! And the most terrible thing is not that I don’t even look human any more, but I’ve stopped caring.’
She was afraid of the nights and demanded a double dose of painkiller. Sometimes she asked for more medication only half an hour after her regular injection.
I wanted so much to do something for her, but there was nothing I could do, apart from insignificant little things: adjust the pillow yet again or warm the cold bedpan before slipping it under her.
Afterwards I went home and left her alone.
One day, only just before the end, Mummy started asking me to stay with her that night. She’d heard a conversation in the corridor and thought they were talking about her, saying she wouldn’t last until morning. She pleaded so desperately that I arranged it with the duty doctor and stayed with her, although in the morning I had to get up early and go to work. They made up a creaky old bed for me, one that a perfectly healthy person couldn’t get to sleep on, let alone a sick patient.
Mummy was restless, she couldn’t lie still, and I gave her cold compresses all the time.
She was suffering badly, I squeezed her hand and remembered how we had her cat put to sleep. The cat had been ill for a long time, and when we brought her to the vet, he looked at her and said:
‘Why are you tormenting a dumb animal like this?’
There was no hope of recovery and we decided to have the cat put down. Mummy took her in her arms, and she was given the injection. The cat curled up and started purring. I could see how fine and cosy she felt, falling asleep in loving arms.
And even then I thought how strange it was that we pity cats and help put an end to their suffering, and we pity people but do everything we can to prolong theirs.
It seemed to me that Mummy and I ought to say something important to each other that night, but we only said the usual things.
I was feeling very sleepy.
So we didn’t say any of the most important things to each other then.
They were giving her strong injections to help her sleep, but they had stopped working.
She had already lost her voice and she whispered:
‘When the pain is this bad, I’m not human any more.’
I saw the nurses leaning down, trying to understand what she was saying, but then drawing back from her breath, as if they could breathe the cancer into themselves.
Mummy whispered more and more often:
‘Let it be soon.’
The last time I saw her she was in a very bad way, she was groaning, her mouth had gone dry, beads of sweat had sprung out on her forehead. Nausea and vomiting even from a sip of tea. Hoarse, laboured breathing. The tumours were squeezing her out of her body.
They called me at work and told me to come, my mother was dying. I called my father.
He didn’t pick up the phone for a long time. When he answered, I realised at once that he was drunk, although it was only midday.
‘Bunny! Guess what I found yesterday!’
‘Daddy, listen, this is important!’
‘Felt boots! With galoshes! Like brand-new!’
‘Daddy, Mummy’s dying!’
I told him to come to the hospital. He mumbled something.
There was no tram for a long time. I had to wait and then take one that was packed.
At the railw
ay station my father clambered into the tram, he didn’t notice me. I almost called to him, but he was already arguing with someone. I felt ashamed – I didn’t want everyone to know that he was my father.
It looked as if he had drunk more after our conversation on the phone.
I hadn’t seen him for a long time and was amazed at how much he had aged and let himself go. Sunken, unshaven cheeks, sprouting grey stubble. An absurd knitted cap and a dirty coat with one button torn off. And all the time he kept repeating, loudly enough for the whole tram to hear:
‘So she’s dying, is she? Well, aren’t we dying? Riding along in a tram! But where are we going? The same place, that’s where! Big deal, she’s dying! The swimming bunny!’
Then he accosted someone:
‘What are you looking at me like that for? The felt boots and galoshes? Aha, really practical, they are! Old tat, of course, but the frost kills the stink!’
He started gabbling something about galoshes and chocolate.
I couldn’t bring myself to go over to him. He noticed me after we got off at the hospital. Dashed towards me and tried to kiss me. I shoved him away.
‘Just take a look at yourself!’
He plodded after me, muttering something resentfully under his breath.
We were too late, Mummy had already gone.
I felt as if something had happened that I could never put right. Not because Mummy was gone – during her illness I had been prepared for that.
For all those months I had felt guilty about her, I don’t know why, perhaps because she was going and I was staying. And I thought this feeling would pass off if I was with her at the moment she died. I wanted to be with her and hold her hand. But I got there too late.
She was with me all the way through her illness, but she died all alone. That was what hurt me most of all.
For the first time in many months her face looked calm and at peace. Her suffering was at an end.
My father stood over her and cried, with his hands over his face. I noticed that they were covered with pigment spots and thought his liver must be in poor condition.
It was good that I had to deal with the documents and the funeral arrangements – all that business connected with a death takes your mind off things.
In the evening I sat by the phone with Mummy’s address book and called her friends and acquaintances to tell them she had died. It was a strange feeling, every time I called someone new, she seemed to come back to life again and only die after I said:
‘My mother’s died.’
It was all so strange. The wreath, the ribbons, the coffin. The motionless body, out of which I had appeared in the world. Once upon a time I was inside her, and I wasn’t anywhere else. And now she was inside me. And she wasn’t anywhere else.
When I was getting Mummy ready, I sprayed her perfume on the body and put the bottle in the coffin.
It turned out that Mummy had paid for everything in advance. She already had a place in the cemetery. It was her mother’s old grave, and her first child was buried in it too. For some reason she had never taken me to the cemetery. Now she wanted to lie with them. She had chosen an old photograph for the headstone, one in which she was young and beautiful. That’s the advantage parents have – they leave without seeing their children in old age. Mummy will never see me as a tearful, irritable old woman, the way I have seen her.
I also recalled how we used to quarrel when I was a spiteful, heartless young baggage and once even wished that she would die – and now look, it had happened.
On the day of the funeral, thick snow fell from early in the morning and turned the cemetery into a world of snow statues – the trees, bushes, fences and gravestones stopped being themselves.
Everyone kept brushing the wet snow off their coats and caps, Daddy wiped his bushy eyebrows with the end of his scarf.
On the way there we ran into another funeral at the entrance and we had to wait. There was a beard covered in snow protruding from the coffin. It stopped being a beard and turned into a little snow statue as well. The other funeral had music. The musicians shook the snow off their instruments, knocked the saliva out of the mouthpieces, huddled up discontentedly, stamped their feet under the falling snow. One of them furtively sipped cognac from a little bottle.
Fires were burning here and there in the cemetery, to thaw out the ground. The smoke drifted to us through the wet flakes as they fell.
I had the strange feeling that we weren’t burying Mummy, but someone else.
I knew it wasn’t her, that the body in the coffin was empty, that Mummy couldn’t be lying there, piled over with snow in an uncomfortable wooden box, with bare, blue hands crossed on her sunken chest, but there were moments when the similarity of this dead woman in the coffin to my mother became unbearable and the tears started pouring from my eyes. Especially because the snow didn’t melt either on her hands or her face and I had to brush it off with my glove.
When I leaned down over her, just before they closed the coffin, I sniffed her for the last time – the aroma of the perfume mingled with the smells of the upholstery in the coffin, the snow, the fires, the flowers, the dead body. But all that wasn’t Mummy’s smell.
My father leaned down and pressed his forehead against hers. Then he came over to me, with droplets dangling on the hairs sticking out of his nostrils. He was going to say something, but just shook his head, as if he was swimming and water had got into his ears. I wiped him under the nose with my handkerchief and hugged him, pressed my head against his wet hair.
‘Daddy, put your cap on, you’ll catch cold!’
A workman was shoving a rope though under the coffin to lower Mummy into the grave. It seemed as if everybody wanted to hug someone at that moment, and he hugged the coffin.
I was surprised that, apart from her closest women friends, some other people I didn’t know at all had come to the funeral. As one woman kissed me, she said:
‘Sasha! How much like your mother you’ve become!’
We went back along the path between the dead cemetery, where nobody had been buried for a long time, and our living cemetery, and the thought came to me that now I could never hug Mummy again, but some tree could hug her with its roots and snuggle up to her.
Yanka didn’t come to the funeral, although I was expecting her. Something had happened to her in general, after that time she was in hospital and I stayed at their place. We used to be best friends, but now she didn’t call, didn’t come round, didn’t ask me to sit with the children. I lugged a tree home for the New Year, decorated it and bought presents for the boys, I wanted to invite them over, have a party for them and me. But Yanka wouldn’t let the children come to me, she said they’d both caught a cold. Only I could hear them shouting into the phone that they wanted to go and see Aunty Sasha.
After Mummy died, I sorted through all her papers and photographs, and met my father to give him some of them. He announced that he had started writing his memoirs and all this could come in useful. I asked him to give me something to read but he refused.
‘All in good time.’
We talked about Mummy, about how hard it was for her to die.
‘You’re still young, bunny, you don’t understand anything about this life! Illnesses are necessary – they help! When the suffering’s that bad, it’s not so frightening to go.’
He drank a little bit, got drunk quickly and started exclaiming indignantly:
‘They go sticking rags in a dead man’s mouth to give him plump cheeks like a little baby, pomading his hair and painting a happy smile on his face! When I imagine them putting that clown’s makeup on me at the end, I feel sick! And I can’t imagine myself in the ground at all. I don’t want that! I want to go like a sailor – splash into the ocean!’
‘Daddy, you ought to get married again!’
The exhausting trips to the hospital were over, it should have been easier without the cancer, injections, bedpans, vomiting and groaning, the odours of a decaying body,
but I found myself thinking that I’d got used to going to see Mummy in the evening and thinking on the way how I would tell her about my day, the good things and the bad things, all the walking about and standing in queues and worrying, how hard it had been for me – and how I managed it all in the end.
I sorted through Mummy’s things. The combs, powder compacts, little mirrors, scent bottles, hair pins, little jars, tubes, tweezers, pairs of scissors, brushes – everything that can’t exist without a woman – went into the rubbish bag.
I came across her old dresses in the wardrobe. As I sorted them out I recalled where and when I had seen her in this dress or that one. Sometimes I couldn’t remember anything, but sometimes a living picture appeared in my mind’s eye immediately: there was Mummy in her blue velvet dress, getting ready for the theatre, combing her hair, talking on the phone in front of the mirror and assuring the receiver that no one wore their eyebrows that way any more. And then I found her Chinese robe with the sky-blue dragons – I scrunched it up and plunged my face into the flowing silk, but it only smelled of old laundry.
Little paper envelopes. All accurately labelled.
‘Sashenka’s first tooth’.
I think: Is that mine or his?
‘Sasha’s hair – one year and three months’.
And again I can’t tell if it’s mine or not.
I found a home-made cardboard fan that I made for her some time at the dacha when I was little, to drive away the wasps. She had kept it for some reason.
I looked through the photographs and was amazed – in her young days Mummy really did look very much like me. Is it possible that if I live to be old I shall be exactly like she was during her illness?
Some of the photographs had dates on them in Mummy’s writing. In one photo Daddy is hugging Mummy somewhere surrounded by snowdrifts. It’s strange that there are snowdrifts already in October. They’re both wearing old-fashioned skiing outfits, but there are no skis to be seen. I checked the date and calculated – it turned out that they had been photographed exactly at the time when I was conceived. Although Mummy’s smiling, her eyes are serious somehow. But Daddy’s laughing with his mouth wide open. He still didn’t know anything about himself then, or about Mummy, or about me. Generally in old photographs nobody ever knows anything about themselves.
The Light and the Dark Page 28
